Critics reviews

Apichatpong’s particular genius is his ability to conjure the sublime from the most basic of elements – and I mean that in both senses of the word. He summons elemental sensations from commonplace sounds and practical effects: a flickering spotlight, humming insects, theatrical props, and a nighttime breeze. It’s a kind of primal magic.

Let your pulse rest and wait until flames burst from Jenjira’s chest; it’s an overlay of a campfire, but the effect takes a while to suss out and is compelling in a low-fi magic way all the same (cheerfully crude but still spellbinding effects are where Weerasethakul and David Lynch meet).

As with so many of this great director’s films, it is fascinated by sleep, shown here as at once a refuge for dreams and a repository for consumptive anguish. All served with the Thai director’s characteristic supple warmth, an easeful and humane compassion that enriches such a conceptual film, but one that also belies its surprising pain.

Partially revealing how the previous scenes were constructed, Weerasethakul emphasizes that the image on-screen has passed through multiple layers of framing and artifice, with the result that its ultimate reality is unknowable.

"Blue" can be understood as an intermediate experience between cinema and installation. The experimentation moves towards the process of dreaming itself: the scenario that changes and the sensations of dream as such, the damage that one can see but not feel.

Apichatpong does not disguise the stagecraft by which he produces this illusion. But it is no less striking for being clearly articulated, and it speaks to both the imaginative power of the dream-work and the degree to which we are subject to its whims.